The Development Of The Elderly Death Attitude Scale And Its Relation With Subjective Well-being

[Objective]To develop The Elderly Death Attitude Scale in line with china’s national conditions and evaluate its reliability and validity, supply a simple and convenient instrument for carrying out research on the elderly death attitudes;and assess the attitude of death and analyze the influential elements of the Chinese elderly; and explore the relationship between attitude to death and subjective well-being of the aged, in order to provide effective evidence through improve their mental health level.[Methods]The research according to the scale development process, which can be divided into three phases.first stage:Search the domestic and overseas literatures about attitude to death, referring to existing attitude to death related scales and according to death attitude maneuverability definition and Chinese characteristics of older people to write entries, through20cases of small sample interview and expert consultation to determine the elderly death attitude scale first draft; second stage:100old people over60years old were recruited to complete the scale draft, through item analysis and factor analysis, according to the standard of statistics and metrology,remove not to meet the requirements of items;third stage:With the Elderly Death Attitude Formal Scale and the SWBS-cc20to investigate and test the reliability and validity of the Elderly Death Attitude Scale, analyzing the level of death attitude and its influence factors and exploring the relation between death attitude and subjective well-being of the aged. Statistical analyses were performed with the SPSS16.0statistics package, items analysis and factor analysis were applied to delete the unqualified items, and then correlation analysis, the Cronbach’s coefficient and split-half coefficient were applied to establish the elderly death attitude scale’s construct validity and reliability. Finally, using T-test、variance analysis and correlation analysis to analyze the level of death attitude and its Influence factors relation with subjective well-being of the aged. [Results]The elderly death attitude scale including five dimensions25items;The Cronbach’s and Split-half coefficient of five domains were shown to be0.541～0.837and0.543～0.744respectivelity, the Cronbach’s and Split-half cofficient for the whole scale were0.850and0.830respectively;The varimax rotation factor analysis of the elderly death attitude scale identified five principal factors and explained for56.176%variances; The majority of items has moderate to strong loading on its corresponding factors, they were from0.489to0.759;The result of the communalities analysis showed that extraction for each item was over0.5;The correlation coefficient between each item and its domain was from0.501to0.840,and the correlation coefficient between each domain and total scale was from-0.597to0.825; Death avoidance score was the highest, natural acceptance score was higher, but approach acceptance score was the lowest; Univariate analysis revealed a significant association between the respondents’ death attitude and age, physical condition, religious belief, medical treatment charge pays way and talking about death case in home; There was a negative and significant relationship between subjective well-being and fear and anxiety of death and escape acceptance and approach acceptance and death avoidance, subjective well-being total score and natural acceptance had a significant positive correlation.[Conclusions]The Elderly Death Attitude Scale has good application on the reliability and validity and feasibility and has the high scientific and use value, it can assess the death attitude of our chinese old people as an effective tool,but more in-depth study on the scale needs to be done in more areas and more samples; Chinese old people were influced by the traditional culture and the science and culture, then they have the ambivalence to death attitude, although they can accept death reality, but at the same time avoid talking about the death;The respondents’ death attitude and subjective well-being have a relationship.